NASCAR Drivers Speak Out After Kyle Busch Suffers Injury Crashing into Wall Without a SAFER Barrier

In case you missed it, Kyle Busch is OUT for today’s “Super Bowl” of Nascar — the Sprint Cup Daytona 500. Busch will not drive after suffering a severe leg injury during the XFINITY Race yesterday afternoon, and while this is disappointing for fans of the sport — there is a bigger issue here to address, and it’s NASCAR’s negligence in failing to reinforce a large number of Daytona’s walls with SAFER barriers.

What makes this is even worse: after the race, NASCAR announced that they will NOW be renovating Daytona Motor Speedway and installing the SAFER Barriers! Why wasn’t this done earlier? Some blame NASCAR being stingy, as the reinforced SAFER Barrier installation will cost an estimated $10 Million. It’s just a little fishy to me that nothing was done until one of the circuit’s biggest stars (love him or hate him) got hurt, before NASCAR thought it was a good idea…

Daytona President Joie Chitwood basically admitted this on Saturday night. In 2013, NASCAR CEO Brian France said nothing prevented SAFER barriers from being installed over every exposed portion of Daytona’s concrete walls. Two years later, nothing’s changed.

“We look at this, we think we have them in all the right places, and if we don’t, we’ll make an improvement, like anything else,” France said then.

At a cost of approximately $500 a square foot, a standard mile of SAFER barrier would cost ~$2.6 million. Though many of the walls at Daytona Motor Speedway are already covered in SAFER, yesterday showed us that lives are in danger as long as there is exposed concrete.

Oh, by the way, NASCAR just began collecting its $8 billion TV contract this weekend. Don’t tell me they don’t have the funds to fix this — they do.

What’s so frustrating about this is I don’t even know what to be mad at. I feel like NASCAR is a billionaire who is driving a $300,000 Bentley around town, the “check engine” light just went off, and they know it needs to be fixed, but, they just don’t do it. It’s not that they don’t have the money to fix a $5,000 transmission — it’s just complete laxity. So, what happens next? They continue to drive through the warning, the engine explodes, they end up getting seriously injured, and then someone tells them: “You probably should have fixed that…”

Needless to say, I’m not the only fan who thinks this is inexcusable — NASCAR drivers are fed up with it as well. Here are their reactions to the accident yesterday, after hearing that Busch hit a wall not reinforced by SAFERs…